Teen vigil at Hobsbawm house

02-10-12

THOUSANDS of inconsolable teenage girls have gathered at the home of deceased historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Conspiracy theories surround the 95-year-old's death

Passages from ‘The Age Of Empire – 1875-1914’ have been drawn on giant RIP cards in glitter paint, and groups of self-styled ‘histo-chicks’ are tearfully reciting paragraphs from Hobsbawm’s seminal 1978 essay on the Communist Party Historians Group.

16-year-old Nikki Hollis said: “I’ve had tickets to his talk about the Spanish Civil War at the O2 Arena for months, it was the first time I was going to see a Marxist historian live.

“Me and Becky would have been in the fifth row centre aisle, so when he talked about the war being a war of intellectuals it would have been like he was saying it just to us.

“Eric was our hero-storian.”

The Historian Death Helpline, first set up after the wave of teen suicides following the death of AJP Taylor in 1990, has been flooded with calls from distraught fans for whom narrative history has become an obsession.

Counsellor Tom Logan said: “I try telling the girls that most of the professors they’re into are homosexuals in their late 60s but they just say I’m jealous.”